Riverine politics

Whether it's about water rights, fishing rights, territorial boundaries or navigation there's no doubting the fact that rivers often have a political life, or at least that they are dragged into the political wranglings of humans. As we lurch into the anthropocene, or whatever word we use to describe the now established planetary dominion of humans and its associated environmental devastation, we might hope for new ways of looking at rivers. Looking after rivers might be a start. The academic trend of querying the nature/culture binary has invited in all sorts of new and creative ways of thinking, and I anticipate that the Whanganui River may well feature in conference papers and the like now that it (if that's the correct pronoun) has achieved the same 'legal rights as human being'. This follows a successful Maori court action that claimed the river as an ancestor. Will it catch on? I know there are similarly strong companion feelings among the indigenous populations of the Amazon - but what does it really mean this river-become-human thing? How will it enact its now human-like rights, duties and liabilities without the intervention of its human guardians? What if all rivers decide (?) to become human? And is it just one-way traffic? Perhaps the move is part of a much wider set of trends in how we think about the world after we've named it. Gone are the days of explorers who traversed the globe in pursuit of new ones to name. Those efforts have now turned to space exploration. Yet some ancient rivers are still associated with the divine, and some, like the Whanganui, are intimately entwined with people's sense of who they are. Dragging the river into court seems a bit like recruiting it into the human realm, to grant it rights seems anthropcentric, yet at the same time what the elders say seems to be raising its status, acknowledging the importance of rivers in their own right which is surely a good thing.

Mapping as data

A map can be very useful when you're lost - if you've got the right one, and if you can make sense of it. And pouring over maps can be quite compelling, too - imagining what it might be like to visit a place, or even to see the ways in which familiar places connect - connections that you had never before considered. But making maps is something entirely different - an artform in its own right, and its something I'm experimenting with at the moment. Trying to figure out different ways of presenting empirical materials has recently led me to think about writing otherwise, and in a number of recent publications Cathy and I have explored how storying our data, using different points of view may gesture towards multiplicity. We call this approach 'stacking stories', although admittedly we haven't yet managed to publish a full account of it. However, the shortcoming is that the story, whilst certainly capable of opening up other ways of looking, remains a predominantly linguistic medium. Cartography, on the other hand, presents different challenges, and although what to write is one of them, it only plays a small part. There has been some fascinating work on mapping as a way of tracing movement, and Abigail Hackett's focus on young children's movement around museum spaces is a great example. But after a recent research visit, I was tempted to try to map the remembered experience of the event. Not being particularly adept at mapping using paper and pencil, I looked for an online solution. It wasn't immediately apparent what would suit my needs, and there were a number of false starts. Eventually I settled on Inkarnate which is free, easy to use and has a pallette of Lord of the Rings-type icons. My original intention was to map felt experience, key moments and so on - the topography of the event, but the mapness of maps took over, and I ended up simply recasting where I'd been, as if the journeying was more significant than what happened (although, I note my stories often have a similar quality). But it's a beginning. Part of the problem is getting familiar with what this simple mapping tool can do; the bigger problem is what you might call translation. How can the territory of an event be mapped? At the moment I haven't got a clue, and maybe the map (or maps) might just end up being a supplement to the storying, but there's certainly potential here, and if not there's an engaging little hobby.

Coming and going

Settling into a new location involves many small adaptions; adjustments that we make in order to stabilise the disturbance caused by the inconvenience of travel, the sudden breakdown of familiar routine, the disorientation that results from the disappearance of familiar landmarks, and all those major and minor details that when combined together have a tendency to make us recoil from the change we encounter. But with experience and perseverance I think we learn to cope. In fact we do surprisingly well. Our capacity for adaptation feels like a sort of survival instinct, and what's more, it seems to be written deep into the psyche. It appears, for instance, as if a territorial sensitivity has been awakened in us, as we attempt to read our surroundings in ways that will aid our navigation to avoid becoming lost. A keen attention to signs and landmarks springs up. Conscious noting of changes of direction are temporarily anchored to particular occurrences as we map our immediate location. In new urban contexts I invariably find myself walking in short bursts, building up an impression, staking out the territory, initially within something like a quarter of a mile radius of my temporary home, hotel or wherever I might be staying. Only when this is done, can I venture further afield daring, perhaps, to be temporarily lost until the familiar re-emerges once again in its reassuring way, like the shoreline out of a sea mist. Cussins (1992) calls this phenomenon perspective-dependence. He argues that we understand where we are, in other words the territory, by making 'cognitive trails'. This is our way of achieving stabilisation. And what's even more interesting is that this activity can work as a metaphor for learning in a more general sense. Although Engestrom (2009) applies this theory to mobile learning, surely it applies to all learning. We need to work out the territory, the key landmarks, the junctions and distinctive features. The quirky features, the dangerous areas, places that are under construction - they are all part of the jigsaw. Our cognitive trails are not like maps, although maps may be helpful, the key thing is inhabiting the space, albeit temporarily, but at least until navigating it becomes embodied. At that point, perhaps, it might be admitted that we have learnt something, even if our sense of territory is only modest, temporary or provisional. Then, of course, on our return, the familiar is re-awakened once more as we rapidly remember things that had been temporarily shelved away. The detail begins to fill in, just as it can 'rez' in a virtual world. And so it is that even though we can't go back in time, we can, as it were, go back in space; go back thanks to the cognitive trails we have blazed and the perspective-dependence we have achieved, the sum total of our prior learning. And that, it must be said, is very comforting indeed, and  perhaps one reason amongst many, why we call it home, sweet home!

Make up money

I'm posting a picture of make-up. In fact I'm posting two pictures of make-up - and that might just be a first for this blog.  It's a photograph of what my mother would call a powder compact, or perhaps more simply a compact. I asked my daughter what she called it. Make-up, she said. It's a pleasingly shaped hinged box in black plastic, which snaps closed with a satisfying 'pock', and as you can see there's a delicate flower-like design in gold on the front. By contrast my mother's were weighty metallic things with an enamal finish. Enough to lend some substance to your handbag, I should imagine. But this is make-up with a difference. It's money. Or to be a bit more accurate it's got purchasing power......just a prototype, I know, but it works. And it may well be the shape of things to come. Probably the next big thing, if indeed something so small can be called big. And here's where the second picture comes in. You see you flip it over, and there's the evidence, in the Mastercard contactless chip which is embedded in the plastic case. Neat. And that allows you to buy things with make-up, and it's what I call new. It made me think of the slow demise of currency. Remember, I'm old enough to

remember decimalisation. When all of a sudden there were 100 shiny new pennies to a pound compared to twelve shillings, or whatever awkward amount we had before. And now it's all turning into plastic. Spending is gradually becoming more abstract, several steps away from the real thing. No wonder so many people get into debt! Of course that idea of coins  as the 'real thing' is actually a strange convergence of the material and the abstract. Maybe currency only has any real meaning at the point of transaction. And financial transaction itself is built on a sort of tacit social contract. Now I'm sure economists have better ways of talking about this, but the one thing I'm sure of is that the money business is looking very different as mobile digital technology takes hold. Take the fascinating emergence of mobile exchanges in Kenya. Read about it here, if you haven't caught the story - and this isn't about smartphones, we're talking basic models, here. What a wonderful illustration of the ways in which social groups take up the affordances of mobile technology and make it work for them to fulfil their needs. In fact, I can see myself doing the Kenya thing rather than carrying around make-up (or cufflinks, apparently).

Translocal assemblages

In the current book project New Literacies around the Globe, we've had to confront some of the myths surrounding the idea of 'the global' as unbounded free space. In its place we use the term 'global assemblages' (from McFarlane, 2009) to capture how complex and multiple forces coalesce as place-based events. We suggest that these events are constituted by the exchange of ‘ideas, knowledge, practices, materials and resources across sites’(McFarlane, 2009:561) as language and power intersect with socioeconomic status. Although the word 'global' is so much easier, it often erases all this. Increases in the extent of broadband connectivity, and growing access to resources (particularly powerful handheld devices) is accelerating the sorts of exchanges that constitute translocal assemblages. But this isn't a universally even process. In the studies featured in the book, we see how practices are patterned by local forces as cultural resources are accessed (or not), appropriated and recontextualised within specific social networks. To be specific: things like PlayStations, jacuzzis,and mobile phones take on different meanings in different settings and practices like texting, chatting and flirting are given local nuances. More often than not, in translocal assemblages we see that sociotechnical practices are absorbed into existing ideologies, sustaining and sometimes amplifying them. In other words, technologies and the global flows that are associated with them rarely flatten out inequalities, but they certainly can draw our attention to them.

The grassy knoll

Visiting Dallas 50 years after the Kennedy assassination could be a significant experience. After all, the shooting was a defining moment in contemporary life, wasn't it? But today looking down on that rather familiar-looking stretch of road, standing on the grassy knoll, gazing up at the box-like structure of the book depository, up to the sixth floor, it all seems rather flat and clean. Sterile, you might say. The memorial fountains are bathed in full sunshine. The sky is a deep blue. It's so neat and clean it's hyper-real. Museum staff are on the streets selling facsimiles of the Dallas newspaper of 22/11/63, but those events have already been swallowed up by history, they are long gone. So, how is it that we can best relate to recent historical events? The most familiar way, I suppose, is to think about what we were doing on that particular day. That helps to pinpoint it, to remember, to tie it to our experience in order to make it more real. In this case I can remember it well. We had been walking in Bradgate Park. It was a cold day, and my father had the gas fire on full when he tuned in the radio for the six o'clock news. That was how he kept up, it was like a religious ritual - listening to the BBC on the wireless (and that's what he called it, the wireless). He was shocked by the headlines, nodding his head saying 'Crikey',or something like that. But my mother's reaction made a much stronger impact on me, because when she came in the room, the rest of the news was playing. Aldous Huxley had died, and that upset her more, and I think she made the mistake of saying so. My father ridiculed her, as he often did. But Huxley was one of her literary heroes, and there was no denying that. Huxley was a towering figure, in more ways than one, and his death was inevitably rather overshadowed by Kennedy's, which is a shame. But they weren't the only newsworthy deaths that day. C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia books, which I had read, and loved, also died that day. And in my still impressionable young mind, I understood my mother's viewpoint completely. Narnia was brilliant; Kennedy was just someone on the news. I'd never been to Dallas, but I had been to Narnia. That was a strange day then: Huxley first, then about 10 minutes later Lewis, followed an hour later by Kennedy. Each died in a very different way, each left a distinctive legacy. I'd very much like to return to Narnia in the same way that I first did, slipping between the fur coats into that snowy landscape, but the warm Texas sunshine seems to place it far out of reach. In some ways it's all in the past.

Body hacking

Any self-respecting cyborg has to be a fan of body hacking. Rather than some sort of grim ritual of zombie-like mutilation this sort of hacking is about collecting (and sharing) data on yourself, or as Gary Wolf founder of the self-quantifying movement puts it, turning windows into mirrors. It's not just about logging your life - that's been going on a while - but the whole idea is to collect your own physiological and psychological data. learn to read it (becoming data-literate in the process) and then use the wisdom of crowds (and experts) to improve your well-being, your physical and mental state. You could see it as digitally-enhanced self-improvement or extreme narcissism. The Quantified Self movement may not be your cup of tea, but when I heard Rodney Jones it made me think how it just is the logical extension of a more general trend in digital life. The supermarket knows what I eat, Amazon what I read, Insight knows when I meditate, and Mappiness knows how I'm doing. Put it altogether, invest in a FitBit and then you're truly post-human. It's the way to go...

Mediated publics

I like Thompson's idea of mediated publics. He argues that public was once defined in terms of people, places and events that share a common locale. Print media disturbed this convergence by creating a 'reading public which was not localised in space and time.' (Thompson, 1995:126). Other media have helped to accelerate fractured or reconfigured publics. In the UK, the 1952 Coronation is often cited as a landmark event, in which the spectating public was dispersed as television ownership grew exponentially. A public event was witnessed in private surroundings by many people, often with neighbours crowding into houses to share the spectacle. Perhaps it could be argued that the first moon landing was another key moment in that the immediate audience was particularly small, but the mediated event reached out to a large and very diverse public. Interestingly though, for the upcoming funeral of Thatcher, the public is divided in other ways, but there's bound to be a heavy media presence.

Screen panic

Journalists have latched on to Aric Sigman's polemic about the health risks of screen time on young children with gusto, even though it's widely acknowledged that negative effects are only 'possible'. The best response is buried in this report, in which Dorothy Bishop observes that 'His comments about impact of screen time on brain development and empathy seem speculative in my opinion, and the arguments that he makes could equally well be used to conclude that children should not read books.' So, maybe this isn't the end of civilization as we know it, we're not all going to hell in a hand cart. Let's here it for Peppa Pig!

Psychogeography again

I haven't written about psychogeography for a while, but my interest was rekindled by the recent broadcast of walking with attitude which included segments from favourites (Iain Sinclair in particular) as well as some learned commentators. Referencing back to Guy Debord was carefully done and the presenters did a thorough job of underlining the political nature of these ramblings, connecting up with magico-marxism (he! he!) in interesting ways. Using the map of one place to explore another, or adopting an algorithm like first left second right may seem a little bit left field at first sight, but what it actually enables you to do is to make new connections, to trespass, to chance upon an otherness and eventually to see how the landscape is patterned by power, ownership, neglect and erasure. If that sounds confessional...it is!